'Humanity as -WE- know it' is an illusion. Ten thousand years ago, humans nearly identical to ourselves lived their entire lives as animals. Many aboriginal tribes still live in the stone age today. The -only- difference between ourselves and most other animals is our capacity for learning and the house of cards that is civilization.
Imagine the possibilities of such an invention. Testing chemicals and medicines on animals would become an expensive, backwards way of ensuring the safety of consumers. Perhaps the simulation of an entire virtual organism would not even be necessary in many cases.. only the molecules (and many properties thereof) that make up the portion of skin and flesh to be tested against topical agents, for example. It sounds as if in the end it would have to be a sort of mini-Matrix.. maybe a virtual area 2 meteres squared where the global constants of Earth gravity, Newton's laws, etc. are emulated. This is beginning to sound like it would require a unified theory of everything. Perhaps some clever people with enough money to research this will figure it out.
It would most likely require quantum computers to have become a reality, so let's hope those come around in the next ten years. (Die, x86! Die!)
Slashdot Mirror
the face of a genuinely astonished human being.
'Humanity as -WE- know it' is an illusion. Ten thousand years ago, humans nearly identical to ourselves lived their entire lives as animals. Many aboriginal tribes still live in the stone age today. The -only- difference between ourselves and most other animals is our capacity for learning and the house of cards that is civilization.
Imagine the possibilities of such an invention. Testing chemicals and medicines on animals would become an expensive, backwards way of ensuring the safety of consumers. Perhaps the simulation of an entire virtual organism would not even be necessary in many cases.. only the molecules (and many properties thereof) that make up the portion of skin and flesh to be tested against topical agents, for example. It sounds as if in the end it would have to be a sort of mini-Matrix.. maybe a virtual area 2 meteres squared where the global constants of Earth gravity, Newton's laws, etc. are emulated. This is beginning to sound like it would require a unified theory of everything. Perhaps some clever people with enough money to research this will figure it out.
It would most likely require quantum computers to have become a reality, so let's hope those come around in the next ten years. (Die, x86! Die!)